


The New Kid

by Eireann



Series: Jag [6]
Category: Star Trek: Enterprise
Genre: Drama, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-31
Updated: 2014-05-31
Packaged: 2018-01-27 18:10:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1718714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eireann/pseuds/Eireann
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A new team member joins a Section 31 squad.  Training is over, now the hard part begins...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Star Trek and all its intellectual property is owned by Paramount/CBS. No infringement intended, no profit made.
> 
> This work has not been beta-read, so all mistakes are mine.

_The first is always the worst._

She knew that – they all knew that – but it wasn’t something that could be said.  Still, at least he didn’t puke, though the muscles of his throat moved hard.  And he held his discipline, cleaning the blade quickly and efficiently on the side of his pants leg before re-sheathing it and turning back to the task in hand.

The body was in the way.  She bent and pulled it clear.  He’d done a good job of it, quick and clean; the stroke had been placed precisely to prevent the guard making a sound, before or after.  The Section’s training had taught him that, and he’d responded exactly as he’d been conditioned to do.  Now he was a little pale, but his fingers went on working with steady purpose.

Five minutes later he was done; two minutes faster than they’d calculated, but he looked confident enough as he nodded.  At any rate, they had no option but to rely on him.  The new kid on the team, he came with impressive recommendations from those who’d had the training of him; this was his first op, and this would give them his measure.

“No point hanging around,” she said.  He thumbed the button on the timer.  The countdown started.  Only he knew how to disable the device he’d built himself; if events went against them and the mission was in danger of being compromised, she’d kill him to prevent him being made to talk.  He knew that, though it probably wasn’t real to him yet; much as the actual act of slitting a throat would not have been, right up to the point where the blood gushed out over his hands.

“Let’s get out of here.”  She hadn’t gotten used to his English accent yet, still found it cute.  He was small and slim and quiet, with beautiful hands and a bitter edge to his smile.  His codename, Jaguar, suited him; he was a creature of the shadows, with a mangling bite when provoked.

She flicked open her communicator.  “Code, code, code,” she said quietly into it.  Knowing that the other members of the team would now react accordingly, the two of them slipped out into the corridor of the doomed station.  The first, small blast would take out life support among other things, but there would be time for the survivors to make their way to escape pods before the second blew the guts out of the place.  After all, there were one or two Starfleet personnel among them, and they had to be given some kind of a chance, even though they'd ignored official warnings to get out before the 'situation deteriorated' - in Sectionspeak, 'before we get tired of asking and start acting.'  Brave or stupid, it depended on your point of view, but they evidently weren't nearly important enough for the team to be tasked with ensuring their survival.

Spots joined them at the first junction.  He asked no questions, but she saw his swift, appraising glance at her companion.  They all knew that it was a big step for a guy whose expertise so far had been confined to disinformation and systems hacking, but this job required someone with explosives expertise, and there were apparently few in the Section better qualified than Jaguar in this respect.  He’d accepted the field job and joined the team, but so far was maintaining a wary distance from the other members of it.  He listened, learned and spoke when he was spoken to, and that was about it.  She and Spots had worked together for so long that she knew instinctively that he had his doubts about the new kid, but was reserving judgment for the time being.

The three of them moved swiftly down the corridors, using access-ways to move down to the lower levels rather than the turbo-lifts which offered so much more chance of encountering trouble.  So far, their arrival seemed to have gone unnoticed.  The seconds ticked down steadily.  Nobody looked at a chronometer, not even the new kid, and though he must have a good awareness of how time was passing he didn’t neglect stealth and caution, taking the lead and peering carefully around every new corner before gesturing his fellows forward.  Although this was early morning by station time, it was always possible that someone might be wakeful, and the guards would be constantly on the alert.  The EM-33 in his hand was ready for use in an instant.

Leo was keeping watch close to the emergency airlock.  The small, sleek black craft in which they’d arrived was still coupled up outside, though the doors were shut so that no-one passing would see anything amiss.  His flat black gaze missed nothing, certainly not the wet red stains on Jaguar’s anonymous dark gray coverall, but his expression didn’t change by a flicker.

Still watching warily for movement, they flitted to the airlock.  Nothing moved.

She keyed in the light signal on her comm unit to tell Stripes they were waiting to board; they wouldn’t touch the airlock controls before they were assured of an immediate escape route.  The response was instantaneous, and reassuring.  She nodded.

Spots’ fingers were quick on the control panel, and the door hissed open after a few seconds.   The hatch at the far side of the access tube was already opening as they tumbled into it.  From the cockpit they could hear the strident alarm of a weapons lock; their presence had finally been detected, and it was past time they were out of here.

They were barely back in their own ship before the hatch closed again and the craft disengaged with a jerk that suggested she’d torn away from the access tube even before the safety locks had released.  The hull shuddered from weapons impacts.

“Hold tight, chaps!  Might get a little rough!” came the shout from the pilot.

The ship veered wildly, and they sprawled on the floor, hanging on to whatever was convenient and fastened down.  More impacts rattled the hull, and a string of highly imaginative and sometimes downright obscene curses from the cockpit indicated that the man at the rudder was seriously displeased by this development.

Then there was suddenly a sensation of the ship being gently but powerfully pushed forward, hard enough to make the bulkheads creak.  There was no sound, since sound does not travel in a vacuum, but as it steadied Leo nodded.  “Job done.”

There were no more impacts. They would be too far away for the second shockwave to touch them when it came, and in the meantime the people on the station would have other and more imperative things to think of than manning weapons systems.

The new kid lifted his head.  If he’d been scared he was hiding it well, though there was still too much tension around his eyes.

He didn’t say anything, but after a moment he stood up, moving with fluid grace.  Still without a word, he sauntered aft to the sleeping area.  There wasn’t enough space in this small craft for individual cabins, and they all bunked down in the one small room till they got back to the freighter in which they normally travelled.  The door closed behind him very softly.

There was a slight pause.  Then,

“Better keep an eye on him when we get to Draylax,” said Spots quietly.


	2. Chapter 2

 The prophecy was fulfilled even before they’d expected.

Barely an hour had passed after their arrival at Draylax before Jaguar had to be extracted from a minor altercation.  He’d subsided, but his demeanor suggested that he was neither reconciled nor tamed, and after that he’d been too quiet.  She tried a couple of times to coax him into conversation, but he’d made it plain he wasn’t in the mood for talking. 

Luckily he caused no trouble during the visit to the trading post where they delivered the case of goods that they’d ostensibly been sent out to deliver.  Spots made a point of staying close to him, but his presence wasn’t needed; though maybe it had been one of the factors that kept the peace, for they all knew the kid was as tense as strung wire.  And sooner or later, that wire would snap.

The snap came in the evening, when they visited a local eating-house.  For all their vigilance, the trouble came out of nowhere in the crowded street outside.  A stumble, a push, hot words, and suddenly Jaguar was pinned against a wall by Spots’s weight and a knife was palmed with Section-trained stealth and rapidity before an altercation with a couple of alcohol-fueled locals became an incident in which the team could ill afford to become embroiled. 

Fortunately, Leo’s presence was not one even the drunks could ignore.  He spoke with calm authority, and after a moment the would-be troublemakers thought better of their intention to teach the little dark Human a lesson in manners, and wandered off in search of easier sport.

In the meantime, Jaguar evidently needed to fight somebody so the team took him into a nearby alley and provided him with four targets for his rage.  None of them observed the Queensberry rules, and they’d all been reared in the Department of Dirty Tricks as far as street-fighting went, but since it was four to one the outcome wasn’t really in doubt.  When they finally helped him up off the floor the mad glitter of helpless rage had gone out of his eyes, and he’d fallen in with them peaceably enough as they went to collect their somewhat belated meal.  He still didn’t say much, but the quality of his silence had changed, and it was now no more than coincidence that Spots sat beside him.

* * *

There was a new sense of tranquillity aboard the freighter as it turned for home.  Their mission had been accomplished, and without a word spoken on the subject the new kid had been accepted.  He knew it as well as they did.  His attitude was relaxed, even if he still rarely spoke unless he had to.

One evening after dinner, when the team had dispersed around the ship in search of their various off-duty pursuits, she wandered up to the helm station.  Stripes was asleep and the freighter was on auto-pilot in his absence, but still it paid to have someone keep an eye on the scanners.  The four of them would take it in turns to sit at the co-pilot’s console.  It was an opportunity to catch up on reading or listening to music or doing puzzles, anything that could be done while keeping an eye on the readouts.  The sensors would sound an alert as soon as anything out of the ordinary was noted, but still it was basic safety to have someone on watch who could respond immediately.

She’d long ago stopped questioning herself about her motives.  Life as part of a Section 31 team didn’t encourage introspection; that way, as the saying went, lay madness.  She loved the adrenaline and endured the tedium, and went where her training and her instincts and her impulses took her.

Jag – as an accepted member of the team, he was ‘Jag’ to them all now – was on watch duty.  He was reading an online report about weapons upgrades, and a PADD on the console beside him bore his own notations.  Doubtless he’d be submitting a requisition for new armaments before they were sent out on their next mission, and roping Spots into helping him install them.

She was under no illusions that he wasn’t aware of her arrival, but he didn’t look up.  She dropped into the pilot’s seat and studied him candidly. 

He was definitely on the small side.  Both Leo and Spots towered over him.  Stripes gave him a couple of centimeters, but then the diminutive pilot had the build of an undernourished teenager as well as the looks of one.  Nevertheless, during the hours spent in the confined space of their shared sleeping area aboard the scout ship (now snugly hidden in a bay on the freighter’s underside) she’d seen enough to know that he was no weakling.  He may not have had the conspicuously rippling muscles that testified to Spots’ off-duty hours of weight-training, but his body was hard and compact, without so much as half a kilo of excess flesh blurring the well-defined musculature.

As for his face, it was handsome enough, if thin, and older-looking than it should have been.  He had high cheekbones and a tightly compressed mouth, and she was a little surprised to find that for all its intensity the steady gray gaze had in it more than a suggestion of sadness.

“To what do I owe the honour?” he asked presently, still without looking up.

She didn’t answer, but – once more going with her code of following an impulse – half-rose, leaned across and kissed him on the mouth.

She wasn’t expecting him to jerk backwards.  The speed of his recoil startled her.  In the now blazing gray eyes she read fear and anger; his whole body was tensed to repel an attack.

Her first astonished thought was that perhaps she’d misread him completely, and that he was homosexual.  Nevertheless, that didn’t tally with his reaction.  He hadn’t reacted with disgust, but with _terror._

He couldn’t be a ….?

No, surely not.  She’d caught him appraising her body once or twice, and they hadn’t been the shy glances of a man unused to intimacy.

He was poised to run, but he didn’t.  He sat completely still, rigid.  She could see the pulse beating rapidly at the base of his throat.

Section rules said you didn’t ask questions.  Still, she was free to speculate.  And experiment.

Even on board ship, he never went unarmed.  Adrenaline flooded her system, adding its distinctive spike to her excitement.   She’d always been a risk junkie, and Jag was still potentially unstable, and probably still charged from his first killing.

So….

His eyes didn’t follow her coverall zip down, but she knew his attention did.  With deliberation she put a hand on his thigh, and slowly slid it upwards.

Not uninterested. _Definitely_ not uninterested.  But still transfixed, furious, terrified – and potentially deadly.  With his own supercharge of adrenaline driving him to react, and in what way there was no way of telling until that stillness shattered.

She held his stare as her hand worked gently.

After a few moments, she leaned forward again, this time moving very slowly, and keeping her hand busy as she did so. 

He permitted the approach.  His breathing had quickened, which was hardly surprising.  As she drew closer his gaze moved from her eyes to her lips.

His hands were resting on the outsides of his thighs and didn’t move, but his mouth responded; softly at first, brushing tentative, feather-light kisses across her lips and nose and chin, and then moving deeper.  His tongue tasted faintly of mint, and she moaned as it flicked gently across her mouth before delving inside.

There was just enough space between the co-pilot’s chair and the console to allow her to straddle him.  For a time he sat completely still, as though his concentration was divided between her hand and his mouth, both of which were intent and occupied.  Then, without warning, his right hand slipped through the opening of her coverall and slid around her breast.

Had this encounter been premeditated on her part, she’d have omitted to put on a bra after her shower.  As it was, a skilled flick of one thumb folded down the cup, removing it from the proceedings.

He pulled back, and looked downwards as the outside of his wrist pushed her coverall open.

She sat, tense as the leopard she’d been codenamed for, as the dark head bent.

One kiss, so light even the supersensitive nerve-endings hardly registered it.  Then he withdrew his hand and steadily pulled up the zipper.  With his other hand he captured hers and removed it from his groin.

Bewildered and a little angry, she sought his gaze, expecting mockery.  Instead she saw a complex mixture of longing and sadness.  “I’m sorry, Pard. It’s nothing to do with you.  It’s – it doesn’t feel right.”

“Because of what you did?” she asked bluntly.  “Because you had to kill that guard?”

The dark eyes dropped.

“You’d rather he’d killed you instead?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Jag.  When you’re on a mission, sometimes it _is_ that simple.  He’d have killed you and then raised the alarm.  If anyone’s to blame for his death, it’s me.  I was supposed to be covering your back while you worked.  I didn’t spot him in time.  You had no choice.”  She pushed the side of his face, a rough caress.  “Are you going to go through the rest of your life regretting the fact that you survived?”

He didn’t answer.  She found herself thinking with a mixture of anger and fear and sadness that maybe that wasn’t too far from the truth: maybe he really didn’t care that much whether he lived or died.  And people aren’t born that way, so he was like many who ended up in the Section’s Ops teams – damaged and dangerous and, in the last resort, doomed.  Unless somehow he got out, and that was easier said than done, even if one day he realized where he was and what by then he would have become. 

She recognized his innocence; she even remembered it.  But it wouldn’t last for long, not in this business.

He didn’t know it yet, but he’d need her.  The time would come when he needed to forget, to blot out what he’d done.  Adrenaline only carries one so far, and then comes the reckoning.  This time she’d left it too late – he’d already begun to think, and even if his body had responded, his mind had not.  The fear she’d seen in his face told her at least part of where his damage lay, and almost against her will she silently cursed whoever had done this to him; she came from a family of horse-breeders, and it was like seeing a promising colt with a mouth ruined by brutal handling.  Nevertheless there would be other times, and next time she’d be quicker off the mark, and their need would be mutual.  There was, indeed, a horrible irony in the situation: it was wholly possible for the compensation for killing to subtly transform itself into the _reason_ for killing _._ Murderers are made thus.  But as long as it got the killing done, who cared?  They were pawns in a dirty game.  They obeyed orders and got the job done, and nobody cared how they lived out their ruined lives.  It was up to them to survive as best they could.

She leaned forward again and kissed him gently.  He wouldn’t accept comfort; he didn’t know how to.  This time he had to find his own peace, wherever it might lie.

She saw the relief in his eyes.  He knew she forgave, and thought she’d forget.

_We don’t forget, in the Section.  You’ll learn that too, honey._

In another life, she might have been sorry.  Now she was just a predator, and she took her hunger elsewhere.  In a ship she shared with three other men, she knew she wouldn’t starve for long.

And yet, even as she enjoyed a more-than-willing body a little later, part of her mind still lingered on storm-gray eyes and a sensitive mouth. 

_I’m going to have your ass, Jag.  You just don’t know it yet._

**The End.**

**Author's Note:**

> All reviews are very much appreciated!


End file.
